AstraZeneca had already bagged the rights to the AbelZeta Pharma-partnered CAR-T cell therapy for most of the world. Now, the Big Pharma has penned a $630 million deal for the remaining rights in China.
The therapy in question, dubbed C-CAR031, is based on AstraZeneca’s own GPC3-targeting CAR-T AZD5851, which was designed with the pharma’s transforming growth factor-beta receptor II (TGFβRII) dominant negative armoring discovery platform.
Armored CAR-Ts have been engineered to express additional proteins alongside the chimeric antigen receptor.
At the tail-end of 2023, U.S. and China-based AbelZeta announced that AstraZeneca would pay an undisclosed upfront payment for a 50% share of the rights to the C-CAR031 in the biotech’s home territory of China, with AstraZeneca holding the rights to the drug in the rest of the world.
Two years later, AstraZeneca has decided that it wants to keep C-CAR031 to itself. The pharma has agreed to pay up to a combined total of $630 million in upfront and milestone payments for the remaining China rights to C-CAR031. The companies didn’t offer a detailed breakdown of the financials.
As AstraZeneca already owns the ex-China rights to C-CAR031, it means the pharma now has the full global rights to the GPC3-directed therapy.
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“This transaction reflects our commitment to leverage our platform technology to develop novel cell therapies in solid tumors of high unmet medical need, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and provides the opportunity to maximize C-CAR031’s global reach,” AbelZeta CEO Tony (Bizuo) Liu said in a Jan. 18 release.
The companies have been developing the therapy for HCC, which AbelZeta pointed out in the release is one of the most common cancers and major causes of cancer deaths in China. A first-in-human study of C-CAR031 in China back in 2024 tied the cell therapy to an objective response rate of 56.5% for patients with the liver cancer across all dose levels, rising to 75% for the highest dose.
While AstraZeneca is keen to take full ownership of C-CAR031, the company recently ended work on the CAR-T that C-CAR031 is based on. That home-built CAR-T, AZD5851, was one of a number of cell therapies that AstraZeneca scrapped last summer.
By that point, AstraZeneca had already taken AZD5851 into a phase 1/2 study of 94 patients with GPC3-positive advanced or recurrent HCC.
